I honestly don't hate Reilly or Ferrell. I've seen both of them do fantastic jobs with decent scripts. This film...does not have one of those.
Holmes and Watson could have been great - after all, the Sherlock Holmes character, being such a cultural icon, is ripe for parody. But this movie does NOTHING with its premise. In fact, most of the script could just have been copy-pasted from your standard brainless buddy comedy set in modern America, with barely any changes.
For one thing, the film has barely any plot - instead, the titular characters simply stumble from one scene to the next, encountering various people of no real consequence (even Moriarty - played by the fantastic Ralph Finnes, a casting choice that would have been so much better in a serious adaptation - is barely in the movie and feels like an afterthought). And sure, not every comedy needs a strong plot; but when you're making a film about Sherlock Holmes, whose very character is built on strong murder mystery plots, you need to at least ATTEMPT to give your parody something of a story.
And for another, the jokes are just painful. As mentioned, most of them barely relate to the Sherlock Holmes character at all - they're just standard slapstick jokes transplanted into a Victorian setting, with barely any changes; or else painful attempts at being "topical" that'll feel horrendously outdated in a few months. The film makes no real effort to satirise the Holmes character - in fact, it never makes us feel like we're watching Sherlock Holmes or John Watson on the screen at all. Instead, we just feel like we're watching Will Ferrell and John C Reilly faffing around in costumes and putting on dumb accents, and the film never tries to convince us otherwise.
It's just low-effort tripe beginning to end. Modern comedy feels like a cesspit sometimes.
